“that’s the Love Guru”
From Troy Patterson, Slate, on the Oscars last night…
“The Franco-Rogen bit deserves a full-length critical appraisal. By full-length, I mean a Ph.D. dissertation tricked out with all the jargon about the contingency of gender performance and reader-response approaches to the late Pirandello. For starters, it had five or six layers of media analysis. (Franco: “Who do you think is a better actor, Ronald Reagan or Barack Obama?”) It rendered strange the familiar Apatovian ideas about masculinity and dude-hood. And it reimagined The Reader as a stoner comedy, a piece of criticism roughly in the same ballpark as Jackman’s terrific reduction of it, in the opening number, to something like the time on Sprockets when we dance.”
3 years ago • Notes